Gabriel and Mary are presented within an elaborately furnished interior that would have been familiar to sixteenth-century viewers. However, most of the objects, arranged unobtrusively within the room, carry symbolic meaning. The altarpiece and the woodcut on the wall, for example, show Old Testament prophets as prefigurations of New Testament themes.

Influenced by Italian art, Joos appropriated a new canon of beauty, a new repertory of rhetorical gesture, and a striking grace of movement in his figures.

W. H. James Weale. Exposition des primitifs flamands et d'art ancien, Bruges. Première section: tableaux. Catalogue. Exh. cat., Palais du Gouvernement. Bruges, 1902, p. 105, no. 276, as by the Master of the Death of the Virgin, but apparently an earlier printing of the same catalogue lists it as by Martin Schöngauer; notes (p. XXX) that all attributions given in the catalogue are those provided by owners.

Martin Conway. The Van Eycks and Their Followers. London, 1921, p. 403, notes that while the general design of our painting is borrowed from Jan Joest's panel in Calcar [Church of Saint Nicholas] the figure of Gabriel owes much to Gerard David's Annunciation at Sigmaringen [collection Hohenzollern–Sigmaringen, now MMA 50.145.9ab].

Max J. Friedländer in The Michael Friedsam Collection. [completed 1928], p. 139, as by Joos van Cleve, who is "identical with the so-called 'Master of the Death of the Virgin'"; places it in his later period, about 1530.

Erwin Panofsky. "The Friedsam Annunciation and the Problem of the Ghent Altarpiece." Art Bulletin 17 (December 1935), pp. 450–53 n. 32, fig. 28, discusses the symbolism of numerous objects in this painting, as well as the juxtaposition of Old and New Testament figures and narratives; notes that the small altarpiece in the background represents the Adoration of the Magi, an event after the Annunciation, while its shutters represent the Meeting of Abraham and Melchisedek, a prefiguration of the Last Supper; observes that our panel "almost teems with intricately symbolical details, so that the overdevelopment of fifteenth century tendencies which characterizes the 'mannerism' of Joos van Cleve and his Antwerp contemporaries can be observed not only in style, but also in iconography"

Harry B. Wehle and Margaretta Salinger. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Catalogue of Early Flemish, Dutch and German Paintings. New York, 1947, pp. 135–37, ill., date it about 1525; compare the design of our picture to the Annunciation panel in Jan Joest's altarpiece in Calcar (Church of Saint Nicholas), which Joos van Cleve helped to paint.

Julius S. Held. "A Tondo by Cornelis Engebrechtsz." Oud-Holland 67, no. 1 (1952), pp. 236–37 n. 15, notes that a small tondo comparable to Memling's Salvator Mundi and Virgin and Child [MMA 32.100.54 and 32.100.59] hangs over the head end of the bed.

A. Hyatt Mayor. Prints & People: A Social History of Printed Pictures. New York, 1971, unpaginated, fig. 90 (detail), suggests that the hand-colored woodcut of Moses on the back wall is a lost print by Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen; notes that "before about 1700 prints were commonly tacked (or fixed with wax) to walls".

Maryan W. Ainsworth. "New Insights into Joos van Cleve as a Draughtsman." Essays in Northern European Art Presented to Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann on His Sixtieth Birthday. Ed. Anne-Marie Logan. Doornspijk, The Netherlands, 1983, p. 16, finds in the similarities in underdrawing between the present work and Joos's Crucifixion altarpiece [MMA 41.190.20a–c] compelling evidence of the same hand at work.

Susan Koslow. "The Curtain-Sack: A Newly Discovered Incarnation Motif in Rogier van der Weyden's 'Columba Annunciation'." Artibus et Historiae no. 13 (1986), pp. 28, 32, ill., interprets the curtain sack of the bed as an analogy of form representative of the Incarnation, when the Word became flesh.

Introduction by James Snyder inThe Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Renaissance in the North. New York, 1987, pp. 50, 52, ill. (color), sees the affluent domestic interior as a reflection of the prosperity of Antwerp, where the artist worked.

Annette LeZotte. The Home Setting in Early Netherlandish Paintings: A Statistical and Iconographical Analysis of Fifteenth- and Early Sixteenth-Century Domestic Imagery. Lewiston, N.Y., 2008, pp. 39, 41–42, 64, 99–100, 107, 112–23, 153–57, asserts that this Annunciation "displays a variety of art objects which work together to communicate the identity of the Van Cleve workshop, the complex iconography and theological associations of the Biblical scene, and perhaps most significantly the socio-historical milieu in the city of Antwerp during the years after the start of the Protestant Reformation"; claims that it was rare for an artist to represent an illumination, a print and a panel painting within a single composition, as is the case here, and sees this as indicating a softening of guild regulations and the development of a collaborative environment in Antwerp by 1525, the panel's [approximate] date of execution; also sees the presence of these objects in a single work as a sign that "the need to eliminate visual references to the work of competing craftsmen may have diminished"; believes that "Joos van Cleve's emphasis on such 'images within images' in his Annunciation also served to promote the importance of art in Catholic devotional practice at a time when the use of imagery as part of the religious experience was being questioned by most Protestant Reformers".